I’ve been using CoPilot 7 for a couple of days. It’s a great application for GPS navigation on Windows Mobile devices.

One big drawback for me is that it doesn’t have the ability to silence the voice without also turning down the master system volume. If I do this, then I can’t hear any other application that needs to make a noise.

So I created my own silent voice. It consists of nothing but blank sound files for every bit of speech. This way, I can select the Silent voice in CoPilot, while leaving the system volume at its normal setting.

Just unzip the files, and copy the ‘Silent’ folder into the same directory as the other voices for your language. Then in CoPilot, you should see ‘Silent’ as one of the voice options.

silent.zip

I’ve created a very simple Google Map page to indicate the nominal ranges of the following atomic clock transmitters:

• MSF (UK)
• WWVB (USA)
• DCF77 (Germany)
• JJY  おおたかどや山標準電波送信所 (Japan)
• JJY はがね山標準電波送信所 (Japan)
• BPM (China)

The indicated ranges are those given by Casio.

Atomic Sync Range Map

Update: Added BPM China.

To complement my VX Commander repeater list, I’ve now created a Python script to generate Point-Of-Interest (POI) files containing all the UK repeaters (as listed at ukrepeaters.net).

The Python script (repeaterpoi.py) takes the repeaters.csv file from ukrepeaters.net, and produces csv files containing the POIs .

These files are then loaded into POIEdit, and exported to whatever format the GPS requires.

Many thanks to Jon G4TSN. I wanted to build a complete solution for myself, and I used Jon’s .ov2 files to see what format I was aiming for.

Hurricane Rita and Continental Airline

The last part of my trip involved a flight from Las Vegas to Houston on Thursday 22 Sep, and a flight from Houston to London on the evening of Saturday 24 Sep. By Tuesday, it was becoming clear that Hurricane Rita stood a strong chance of hitting Houston on Saturday morning, so it didn’t look like a good place to be going to.

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